You are here

Broadcasting

The recipient of many prestigious literary prizes, the “darling” of Israeli academe and the subject of several scholarly Hebrew monographs, Kahana-Carmon’s central place in Israeli literature was formally recognized in 2000, when she was awarded the coveted Israel Prize.

“Man vergisst nichts, nichts” (One forgets nothing, nothing, Essenzen, 106), says Anna Maria Jokl in her book Essenzen (1993), when, in her seventies, she looks back at her life—a life that struggles against forgetting, a life shaped by persecution, exile and repeated new beginnings in different places.

In March 1939, Tziporah Jochsberger’s musical talents won her acceptance to the Palestine Academy of Music in Jerusalem, good fortune that ultimately saved her life. Since then, Jochsberger has used her music to stir the Jewish soul.

American Jewish music has expanded vastly in variety, range, and quality of activities. Jews brought to America their secular-folk and sacred-liturgical musical heritage. There has been a renascence of age-old traditions that have become means of self-expression for Jewish women.

Paula Jacques is the pen name of Paula Abadi (b. Cairo, May 8, 1949). Since 1975 a talk show hostess on the French radio networks France Culture and France Inter, she is also a novelist, many of whose books achieve second editions as paperbacks. Paula Jacques’s work reconstructs the life of the mostly French-speaking Egyptian Jewish community prior to their expulsion at the time of the Suez crisis.

As a member of the faculty in the German department at Hunter College, Anna Jacobson fought to preserve the study of German language and literature during the 1930s and 1940s, when many felt that it was inappropriate for American students to study the language of the Nazis. During her tenure as chair of the German department from 1947 to her retirement in 1956, she worked to present the richness of German thought and writing to Hunter students and to the American public.

One of the most famous and most popular French actresses of her generation, Isabelle Anne Huppert was born on March 16, 1953, to a well-to-do family. Her father Raymond was an industrialist, and her mother Annick an English teacher. Huppert is the youngest of their five children, four daughters and one son, all of whom took up professional or artistic careers: Jacqueline (b. September 30,1944) is an academic scholar; Elisabeth (b. June 20,1948), a former director, actress and writer; Caroline (b. October 28,1950), a script-writer and director. Rémi is an author. With her gifted siblings, Huppert spent a protected childhood in a residential neighborhood near Paris. After high school at the St-Cloud Gymnasium, Huppert studied Russian at university and earned a B.A. Encouraged by her parents, she went on to study theater at the Versailles Conservatoire and received a first prize there. She spent one year at the famed Rue Blanche theater school and then entered the prestigious Conservatoire National d’Art Dramatique. Thus began a theatrical career that Huppert has never given up, despite her demanding work for the cinema.

For Rokhl Holzer, a riveting recital artiste and unforgettable star of the Yiddish stage, acting the part was never enough. She lived and breathed each role, mesmerizing audiences in Poland, Lithuania, Australia, Israel, USA, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden with her ability to transform herself into any character she portrayed. Holzer was also an adept and adored director of the Yiddish theater, a true team worker who brought out the best in all with whom she shared the stage.

“I always have to break a song over my back. … I just can’t sing a song; it has to be part of my marrow and bones and everything,” Libby Holman explained in a 1966 interview. Daring, dark, and impetuous, Holman led a rich public life that touched a dizzying array of people, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Montgomery Clift, from Alice B. Toklas to Jane Bowles. A musical and sexual revolutionary from the 1920s to the 1960s, Holman succeeded at two different musical careers. Known as the “Statue of Libby,” she carried one of the smokiest torches of American music hall society in the 1920s and 1930s, and was the inventor of the strapless evening dress. From a deep sense of personal commitment, she later made significant contributions to the civil rights movement as both an artist and a wealthy benefactor. However, murder, millionaires, death, and suicide were morbid recurring themes in Libby Holman’s life, reaching tabloid proportions.